Performance and Scalability Evaluation of Oracle VM Server Software Virtualization in a 64 Bit Linux Environment

The growing adoption of virtualization in the enterprise environment has resulted in a couple of huge benefits, however, this has not been without its attendant problems and anomalies, such as performance tuning and erratic performance metrics, unresponsive virtualized systems, crashed virtualized servers, misconfigured virtual hosting platforms, amongst others. The focus of this research was the analysis of the performance of the Oracle VM server virtualization platform against that of the bare-metal server environment. The scalability and its support for high volume transactions were also analyzed using 30 and 50 active users for the performance evaluation. Swing bench and LM bench, two open suite benchmark tools were utilized in measuring performance. Scalability was also measured using Swing bench. Evidential results gathered from Swing bench revealed 4% and 8% overhead for 30 and 50 active users respectively in the performance evaluation of Oracle database in a single Oracle VM. Correspondingly, performance metrics of 75% and 87% were obtained with 30 and 50 active users in a dual Oracle VM server, indicating performance scalability improvement with two virtual machines. Our results also revealed significant percentages in latency and bandwidth achievement by Oracle VM server which cannot be overlooked, despite some variances in results obtained from LM bench measurement.